The pen is mightier than the sword, but not the superhero

A true tale from Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

Kennedy Stetson, son of the famous Stetson hat company founder, saw a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen tie the family's black maid Flo to a tree and gang rape her for talking back to a white trolley driver who had short-changed her.

Historian Wyn Craig Wade would later write, in his book about the KKK called The Fiery Cross, that Kennedy was "the single most important factor in preventing a post-war revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the north."

Kennedy's plan was simple: he would join the Klan and bring it down from the inside. Within just a few weeks of membership, Kennedy had compiled all the secret passwords, secret language (I'm looking for Mr. Ayak (translation: are you a klansmen?)), and had figured out its corporate structure with proof that the KKK was a slick profit-making, very political organization.

With information comes power, and Kennedy began wielding it. He passed Klan information to the Assistant Attorney General of Georgia, a known anti-clan buster. He presented to the Governor of Georgia the evidence on which the Klan's corporate charter--registering the KKK as a non-profit, non-political organization--was revokable.

The only thing was, it didn't work.

Like a creeping weed that infests the garden by an intricate root system from the bottom up, the KKK was deeply entrenched in the business, politics and law enforcement of the day. It seemed hopeless.

Until Superman literally came to the rescue. In an a-ha moment worthy of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Stetson Kennedy wrote to the producers of The Adventures of Superman, a radio show broadcast at dinnertime to millions across the nation. Turns out that the show's producers were looking for new villains, having exhausted Hitler, Mussolini, and the like. Kennedy gladly handed over all the secret information he had gathered and the producers wrote four week's worth of programming.

Almost instantly, Klan members started seeing their kids making a mockery of the KKK's most intimate rituals and code words. Towels and pillowcases tied around their heads, running around looking for Mr. Ayak and shouting chants...

In short, Klansmen were humiliated.

Membership applications plummeted and the Klan was never the same again.

It's a good thing that the KKK never had any kryptonite.

Scientific field branding

Recently, there was a competition put forward by the British minister of science to explain the Higgs-Boson in 2 pages or less (link needed). Similar wagers have been made before to explain climate change in one slide, or string theory in less than 2 minutes.

Here, I propose two simple visualizations using already existing widgets for the shortest practical introduction to a scientific field (i.e. a given keyword eg. visual cortex). The goal is to capture the brand of a field for a scientifically curious lay audience. For the given keyword, look up the list of publications with that keyword from Google Scholar. Prune the list to retain only top-few publications, sorted by a metric (eg. no. of citations, or other relevant ones like h-index or Erdös Number depending on the field).

1. Collect the keywords from each of these publications and input into wordle.
2. Collect the affiliations of each author in each publication and plot it on a google world map with pins.

This can be a simple add-on to a social network for scientists such as ??. In Finland it seems to be Facebook.

Coming up: For the latest in social software, see graphjam and jamglue